Malstrom:
Denise Kaigler leaves Nintendo
Now we know who that unfortunate soul at Nintendo who was assigned to read this site. I can imagine Kaigler pounding her desk after another day of reading this site and screaming, “No more! No more! I can’t take this job anymore! No more Malstrom!” and left. (What is going on with that IGN page? You can provide User Reviews for Kaigler!??? And she gets an average of 5.5?)
But on a more serious note, this is an interesting development from Nintendo.
This is the press announcement when Kaigler was hired:
Nintendo of America today announced the appointment of two sales and marketing executives for the company’s Redwood City, California office. Kaigler will be vice president of Marketing & Corporate Affairs starting February 18 and will oversee corporate affairs, such as public relations, government affairs, investor and analyst relations, corporate and internal communications while playing a key role in global coordination. Van Zyll will be the new director and general manager of Latin America starting immediately and will be responsible for the direction, implementation and creation of marketing, operational, and sales strategies for Latin America. Both will report to Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing, Cammie Dunaway.
“Denise and Bill bring a wealth of branding and marketing experience to our team,” said Dunaway. “Their expertise will help us keep Nintendo’s momentum going strong throughout 2008 and beyond.”
Kaigler most recently had a 16-year tenure at Reebok International, serving as head of Global Corporate Communications and Corporate Citizenship. She was also head of Corporate Communications in the United States for the parent company of Reebok, the Adidas Group. Kaigler assumes the role of Perrin Kaplan, who left Nintendo at the end of December.
The bold is for the irony. 2008 has been a disastrous year for the Wii. (Nintendo went from constant sell-outs in America to having to price cut the Wii in order to sell it. That can be interpreted as nothing but a steep plunge.)
Now, I don’t know any inside details or anything going on. So be warned about what is going to follow is pure hypothesis and observation from an outside view which is severely limited in information. Keep in mind that gaming is an extremely tough business and even Kaigler remarked it was like “taking a sip from the firehose”. Nintendo, being a Japanese company, also does things very different than Western companies.
I do not believe she “quit for family reasons”. Here is why:
Here is a comparison of her resignation statement (as well as Nintendo’s statement) along with Kaigler quotes months ago:
It’s a fact of life that job and family often pull us in opposite directions. As regular readers of this feature know, this has proved particularly challenging for me, as I’ve spent the last two years commuting almost constantly between San Francisco, Seattle, New York and my home in New England. It has been a fantastic adventure, but the time has come where I need to choose one over the other … and I have to choose my family.
However, a few months ago she said this:
I’m pretty much in a perpetual state of travel, but it is what it is. I enjoy it. Given what we do, you’ve got to get out and about and see how folks are responding to our games. That’s what’s fun about traveling. I love walking in airports and sitting in airports seeing people play the DS and when people see that I work for Nintendo, I love the stories that I hear. All of a sudden you hear everything! “My mother has a Wii and my brother has a Wii and my son has a DS.” I was on a plane with my DSi and the guy sitting next to me asked if it was the new DSi. Of course he didn’t know I worked for Nintendo at the time. And I said yep I’m playing it.
Later on the flight, I had to do some work, of course he’s looking. I now have a privacy screen because you’ll see people looking over [at laptops]. I never work on confidential information on an airplane because everyone can see it. [What I was working on] wasn’t anything confidential, but it had Nintendo on it and he goes, “You work for Nintendo?” It’s so funny too because part of me wants to go, “How would you know, why are you looking over at my screen,” but then it started a fun conversation about Nintendo. It’s so great to hear people want to share their stories with us about their experience with our games. In that respect to get that kind of real time feedback is pretty cool. And of course we get a lot of letters and e-mail and phone calls, it’s cool.
She doesn’t sound unhappy at all a few months ago. “But Malstrom, she could have been putting up a false image.” OK. But she was doing what she was doing for around two years. And she was doing a similar *constant traveling* job for Reebok for 16 years.
Nintendo said:
“Denise Kaigler has been a valuable part of the Nintendo of America team for the last two years. She’s made a personal decision to spend more time with her family in New England. We wish her all the best in this next chapter of her life…
But when Kaigler was hired, it was:
Kaigler most recently had a 16-year tenure at Reebok International, serving as head of Global Corporate Communications and Corporate Citizenship. She was also head of Corporate Communications in the United States for the parent company of Reebok, the Adidas Group. Kaigler assumes the role of Perrin Kaplan, who left Nintendo at the end of December.
So I do not buy the reason that she left for ‘family business’. Sure, she might have, but she has been doing the traveling thing for around twenty years.
Here is Kaigler’s recent explanation to what she does day to day:
So give us a little peek behind the curtain. Walk us through a typical day at Nintendo for you.
I’ll first answer specifically, and then more generally. Here’s a curtain from last month that I thought you’d be interested in peeking behind. On Tuesday, October 13, Nintendo had two tables at the Entertainment Software Association’s “Nite to Unite” black-tie fund-raising industry gala in a downtown San Francisco hotel. Reggie, Cammie and I, along with other NOA reps, invited several reporters, agencies, customers and analysts to join us. Soon after, I headed to SFO to catch the red-eye to New York.
A few hours after I landed, I was sitting in a hotel suite with Mr. Miyamoto for a series of press interviews to promote New Super Mario Bros Wii and Wii Fit Plus. During the lunch break, I joined Mr. Miyamoto and two other NOA reps in a few rounds of New Super Mario Bros Wii. In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing more exhilarating in this industry than to play a Mario game with Mr. Miyamoto! I was playing with Mr. Miyamoto and Bill Trinen from the Treehouse team. I don’t care how good a gamer you are, you’re going to have trouble keeping up with those two, and I kept dying. At one point, Mr. Miyamoto took my Wii Remote and handed me his. He’d built up 87 lives!
I wouldn’t say a whirlwind day like that is typical, but it illustrates how there really isn’t just one average workday in my NOA life. I rotate through NOA’s three offices on a monthly basis (in Redwood City, CA; New York; and Redmond, WA). And we host product launch events and other marketing activities in various cities, so I travel to those events on a regular basis. Every now and then when I wake up I have to remind myself what city I’m in.
Travel aside, my typical day lasts about 12 hours. I spend the very early part of the morning responding to overnight e-mail from our parent company in Japan and colleagues in Europe. I then review numerous gaming and mainstream media news sites and blogs so I can catch up on overnight Nintendo, industry and general news.
I spend the bulk of my day working on plans, reading and approving press releases and statements, participating in media interviews, brainstorming with my team on different events and activities, working on reports and budgets, and attending various video and teleconferences. I report to Cammie and work very closely with Reggie, so we are in constant communication with each other daily. When I receive copies of pre-released software, I carve out time on my schedule to play it. This is in addition to playing our released games on a daily basis at home and on the road. In addition to New Super Mario Bros Wii, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box and Style Savvy.
On any given day, I might also have a breakfast, lunch or dinner meeting with a reporter or another industry contact. I do this on a regular basis because I think it’s important to maintain solid relationships in this industry. I actually wish I had time to meet up with more IGN gamers so I could understand what you guys mean sometimes when you post your comments after reading a Nintendo Minute.
The first bold is there because I thought it was funny. The second is bold because even when I make a joke, it ends up somewhat true. Kaigler probably was the unfortunate Nintendo soul who had to read this site. And the third bold shows that Cammy is her boss but she also works closely with Reggie.
When making this post, I found this article from the Boston Globe during the web searches. If you want to know who Kaigler truly is when she isn’t doing the Nintendo PR thing, then read the article. I’ll leave the interpretation of that article up to the reader.
